Andrew Laird (Brown University)
The importance of Greco-Roman texts for early European conceptions of the Americashas long been recognised (Grafton & Siraisi, Haase & Reinhold, Lupher), but did colonization and sustained encounters with indigenous societies change the ways in which classical authorities were canonised, conceived and invoked? This paper will examine the recurrence of a cluster of classical texts in two scenarios in sixteenth-centuryMexico to show how such texts could determine both social policy and the mediation of specific native traditions.
(1) Social policy: Quiroga’s utopianism
In the 1530s, a Spanish judge, Vasco de Quiroga, established residential communities for native Mexicans left destitute after the Spanish conquest. According to Fray Cristóbal Cabera (De… infidelium conversione), Quiroga thus re-enacted the well-known role of Cicero’s sapiens (in e.g. De inventione: Copeland), who in remote antiquity first brought scattered people into civilised oppida. Quiroga himself attributed his initiative to his reading of Lucian’s Saturnalia in Thomas More’s Latin translation (Thompson), and to Virgil, Ecl. 4, which predicted the return of Saturn’s kingdom. The distinction between a Golden Age and an Age of Iron led Quiroga to envisage two ‘republics’ in his Información en derecho (1535): one with a communitarian model for the Indians (whose customs matched the Golden Age), the other for the Spaniards who were living in an Iron Age and whose laws could not apply to native groups (Martínez Baracs 2005).
(2) Mediation of native tradition: Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl
In the 1550s, native Latinists began compiling the Florentine Codex, an encyclopaedic study in the Mexican language of Nahuatl, of pre-Hispanic society. Book 3 recounts thatthe deified king Quetzalcoatl had been the first person to assemble the peoples dispersed over Anahuac (cf. Cicero; Virgil, Aen. 8.319-25). His reign was a time of abundance, in which “varicolored cotton grew … which did not need to be dyed” (FC 3.3; cf. coloured wool, Ecl. 4.42-5). The people of Tula continued to believe Quetzalcoatl would return to rule again (FC 8, Preface).
Conclusions
The classical authorities invoked in these contexts provided more than illustrative exempla. The presence of Eclogue 4, seldom mentioned in European accounts of the Americas before 1570 (Romm), endowed Cicero’s sapiens and the Latin translation of Lucian with an eschatological dimension. Recognition of this raises questions of broader significance: about whether the convergences highlighted here were stylised or spontaneous, about the performative nature of early colonial responses to classical texts, and about the adequacy of current models of reception for interpreting them.